CRISFIELD, Md. – Despite forecasts suggesting that nearly all of Crisfield will be underwater in a matter of decades, local officials and residents of the town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore have decided to make a stand.
They have coalesced behind an ambitious plan to transform the small municipality into a fortress against heavy rains, high tides and hurricane-whipped storm surges.
“Flooding was something we were taking for granted, but it has taken a major toll on our city,” said Crisfield Mayor Darlene Taylor, who was elected to the post in 2022. “When I was running for office, people were telling me, ‘You can’t take care of anything until you fix the flooding.’”
The primary aim of the massive reconstruction is to make it harder for water to barge into town. When the Tangier Sound rises and threatens to flood the area, a perimeter barrier of berms, elevated roadways and bulkheads will hold off water up to 5 feet above sea level.
But if floodwaters manage to get in, a series of tide gates will fly open to drain it away. Three new pump stations will help drive out the water faster. Wetlands will be carved out of the landscape to collect any remaining stormwater.
The town is seeking a $38 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program to finance the southern half of the project. As that work progresses, local officials expect to apply to the federal agency for a second grant requesting roughly the same amount of money for the northern half.
The effort in Crisfield, population 2,500, is attracting attention nationally. Observers view it as a test to determine whether small, economically disadvantaged enclaves can marshal the resources necessary to survive climate change.
“Other communities can look at this framework and say that these are the parts we need to put together to get from point A to point B,” said Bhaskar Subramanian, who heads an adaptation research program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Crisfield in 2021 was among the inaugural group of recipients of a NOAA grant that covers the costs of developing resilience strategies for coastal places with “vulnerable” populations, such as communities of color and those having low incomes.
Census figures show that about 35% of Crisfield residents are Black; nationally, they represent about 13% of the population. And family incomes, in general, in the town have been crippled over the years by declines in the seafood and manufacturing industries. Households had a median income of $38,000, which was less than half the amount of the typical Maryland household, according to 2022 Census data. The poverty rate was nearly three times higher than the state average.
The town used the $292,000 NOAA grant to bring in experts from the Nature Conservancy, the University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center and George Mason University to develop a framework for climate-related decisions. Their final report isn’t expected to be released until this spring. But earlier drafts helped form the foundation of the extensive flood plan submitted to FEMA.
“Crisfield is showing it can be done,” said Celso Ferreira, the environmental engineer at George Mason who developed the local flood modeling for the planning effort. “I think this is the poster child for climate adaptation.”
Rising tide
Crisfield has a fraught relationship with water.
It provided the bounty of oysters that transformed the Somerset County hamlet into the “Seafood Capital of the World” in the late 1800s. The population boomed to more than 25,000 during the first decade of the 1900s, making it Maryland’s largest city after Baltimore.
But as the health of the Chesapeake Bay deteriorated, so did the city’s economic fortunes. Today, watermen still haul oysters and crabs into Crisfield’s harbor, but the industry is a shell of its former self.
Meanwhile, the water has been showing its ugly side with greater frequency.
Most of the land beneath the city is less than 3 feet above sea level. High ground is so scarce that much of the downtown was constructed atop oyster shells discarded during the harvest’s heyday.
Growing up in Crisfield, John “Buddy” Ward hardly ever saw standing water. Now, it’s just about a weekly occurrence, he said.
“I don’t remember 50, 60 days a year with nuisance flooding,” said Ward, 58, formerly president of the Crisfield Chamber of Commerce. “It’s certainly gotten worse over the years. It takes next to nothing now [to flood].”
Nuisance flooding, also known as “sunny day” flooding, is generally not driven storms. It by usually refers to high tides overtopping sea walls or rainwater backing up through storm grates into city streets. The water rarely rises high enough to inflict serious property damage, but it often leads to traffic snarls and other headaches.
Like many coastal communities in the Bay region, Crisfield’s flood woes are expected to worsen in the coming years as climate change causes seas to rise further and increases the frequency of intense rainstorms.
“The flooding [in Crisfield] is getting so frequent, it’s really interfering with people’s lives,” said Stephanie Dalke, who was part of the University of Maryland research team that performed the cost-benefit analysis of the proposed flood strategies. “And it’s only going to get worse. The future projections can get really scary.”
In 2021, the city experienced 88 floods with water levels of 1.5 feet, said Elizabeth Van Dolah, a Nature Conservancy scientist. Another six days were wracked by at least 2.5 feet in flooding, enough to swamp a car. At some point between 2050 and 2080, Van Dolah and her colleagues expect those 2.5-foot floods to become a daily scenario.
Taylor said the increasing flooding is already hampering the city’s economic growth.
“It creates not just an inconvenience,” she said. “It’s a deterrent for businesses to come into our community. They don’t want to come into a place where their merchandise can become compromised or nobody can access it.”
For many residents, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was a wake-up call. The “superstorm” swept nearly 5 feet of storm surge into the town, flooding hundreds of homes and businesses. Millions of federal dollars flowed into Crisfield to rebuild and raise buildings.
But a comprehensive flood-adaptation program has eluded the community — until now.
Building a partnership
From Norfolk to Baltimore, many large urban centers in the Bay region have immersed themselves in planning and building for a future under climate change. They can do so because of their robust tax bases, which help fund large public works projects.
Many advocates in the emerging field of climate adaptation fear that while some small towns face many of the same climate threats, they don’t have access to the same resources and might be left to fend for themselves.
“These kinds of communities fall through the cracks sometimes,” said Dalke from the University of Maryland.
With its stable of outside partners — advisors from the state and federal government as well as from nonprofit groups and university research labs — Crisfield has pushed against that tide. In comments to the audience of town residents at the start of an October workshop about the resilience plan, Mayor Taylor gestured toward the top scientists and policy experts at the head of the room.
“Crisfield has never seen an opportunity like this,” she said. “There’s big money that’s happening on the Western Shore. They’re getting these types of projects all the time. But here we are with the opportunity to get that type of support.”
As the Nature Conservancy-led research effort began churning out computer flood models and cost estimates for various strategies, the town worked with a team at FEMA to turn those proposals into a citywide plan.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s research and development division has been studying how to protect the community from future storm surges with “green” projects, such as restoring marshes and natural shorelines.
The EPA and another environmental group, Interfaith Partners for the Chesapeake, are planning to host training sessions in environmental leadership for residents.
The impetus behind Crisfield’s progress so far, according to several observers, can be traced to one city employee: grant administrator Jennifer Merritt. Her experience includes working in a circuit rider program as a part-time assistant city manager for Crisfield and as development coordinator for a local land trust. She joined the town in her current role in November 2022.
Merritt’s knowledge in grant writing and the inner workings of local government cleared the path for other groups and agencies to join the endeavor, Taylor said. “She’s that person who understands what the needs of the community are and [how to] match that with the resources that are available.”
Many smaller communities hit a roadblock when they try to fund big climate projects. Normally, Crisfield would have been on the hook for covering 25% of the FEMA construction grant’s total. That would have amounted to more than $9 million of the overall $38 million tab.
But a 2022 federal law led to the Crisfield area becoming designated as one of 483 “community disaster resilience zones” nationwide. Those areas are eligible for paying just 10% of the total price tag. As a result, the town government now would only have to foot $3.8 million of the bill.
Merritt said the town will seek a 1% interest loan from the Maryland Department of Emergency Management to cover that expense. Town leaders, she added, expect to avoid raising residents’ taxes in paying back those loans.
The flood-resilience project had to be separated into two phases because the FEMA grant program the town is pursuing has a cap of $50 million, Merritt said. Crisfield’s Chesapeake Avenue, two-thirds of a mile from the city dock, forms the boundary between the two sections.
The work will address one of the town’s longstanding infrastructure problems. There are tide gates already in place around the community, but some have failed over the years from lack of maintenance or a buildup of debris obstructing water flow.
Merritt said some tide gates were installed in such remote, marshy areas that it’s all but impossible to keep tabs on them, let alone operate them during an unfolding emergency. The project will add six new gates where they can be more easily accessed.
The project is getting a boost from a flooding fix already in progress. An earlier $1.4 million FEMA grant is helping to finance the design and construction of two of the three pump stations called for in the city’s flood plan.
Construction is set to begin on those two pumps in early 2025. If the town gets the $38 million grant, which will be decided later this year, the first phase or work is expected to move forward as early as 2026.
Merritt has been a fixture at public meetings, working closely with the Nature Conservancy on the creation of a community advisory committee.
Frances Martinez Myers, one of the committee’s regulars and president of the Greater Crisfield Action Coalition, said she can’t wait for construction to start. “It will get messy, I’m sure, when they’re doing it,” she added, “but I believe it has given us all hope.”